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How They Do It

Ever wonder whether those funny photos you get in your e-mail and see on web sites are real? Some are, but with the advent of easy-to-use photo touch-up software, more and more people are manipulating and combining one or more innocent images to make a brand new bizarre image. There are web sites devoted to displaying these manipulated photos (final image only) and other sites that provide instruction in how to use the various software packages. But here, I'm simply displaying some widely-circulated images and showing how the manipulation, if any, was done.

The original photo taken in Australia was posted on an Australian web site, Ozjokes.com, and is quite funny in its own right since the poster on the bus says, "If you don't have GIO third party property insurance, we suggest you don't hit this bus." However, during the "All your base are belong to us" on-line game craze, people manipulated every image in sight to insert the "Engrish" phrases used in the game. (See examples at All Your Base Web Site.) The manipulation of this image was fairly straigntforward: the original billboard type was replaced with solid blue, probably using a "clone" tool, and then the "All your base..." type was drawn on in white and yellow. The photo was also cropped.

This photo has been circulating, sometimes with a caption, and sometimes with a long story about someone named Roger holding an 87-pound cat that is 69" long. Accoring to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's largest domestic cat from Queensland, Australia, was a male tabby named Himmy who tipped the scales at just under 47 lbs. and was 38 inches long. Thus, this photo is clearly faked. In fact, according to the Ottawa Citizen, the picture actually shows an Edmonds, Washington, man named Cordell Hauglie and his cat Jumper. The photo was manipulated with PhotoShop to create the effect of a feline of much larger-than-ordinary size. According to Mr. Hauglie: "My daughter wanted to send an electronic photo of her cat to her friend. I got a little carried away. When we sent it to her friend, we never dreamed anyone would believe the photo was real." Hauglie has had many chuckles over analyses of the photo. Some viewers assert the cat appears stuffed, while others say it's standing, not being held. Still others suggest the man in the photo doesn't look as though he's holding a 40-kilogram object.
Truth is, he isn't. His son held up the quite ordinary-size cat for one photo, proving you can suspend a cat in that fashion, and Mr. Hauglie stood in the same light for the next shot.

One giveaway to the photo manipulation is the foliage outside the window which is generally sharp and well-defined but in the immediate vicinity of the tail becomes blurred and indistinct.

The left photo above has been circulating on the Internet. In view of its similarity to the man holding the giant cat, people were tempted to also dismiss this photograph as a hoax. However, in this case the photo is genuine. Because the cat is stretched out full-length in the woman's arms, it looks much longer than if it were posed in a normal stance. In addition, its luxurious, fluffed-out coat of hair adds to the impression of large size.

The feline pictured is a 2-year-old Maine Coon cat, Riley, photographed in the arms of his owner, Martha. According to Martha, Riley has lost a bit of weight recently, but he weighed about 24 lbs. at the time the picture above was taken. Below is another photo of Riley lying down and one of him with his sister, Callie.

The photo to the left has been circulating on the web, often with a caption indicating that it was a tense rescue off the coast of South Africa. In fact it was no such thing. The photograph of the helicopter came from a web page describing the U.S. Air Force HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter while the photograph of the jumping shark was taken by underwater photographer Charles Maxwell off the coast of South Africa. An anonymous photo hacker flipped the picture of the helicopter and diver and pasted in the jumping shark. As fakes go, this one is better than most. No obvious artifacts point to digital manipulation of the picture. Unfortunately, the backing story is not of the same quality. It is badly edited and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background is at odds with the claim that it happened in South Africa.

In the funny sign above, the letter I in "Final" has fallen to the left creating the word anal. It has been said the photo comes from Lexington, South Carolina, but nobody seems quite sure and, in fact, there are 18 towns named Lexington in the U.S. The manipulation to aubstitute "All your base..." is well done and while some of the letters have been cut and pasted from those in the original sign, others such as the B, G, and U had to be cut and pasted from small elements of other letters.

This car interior has been used as the basis for many altered photos (various signs through the windshield, jet plane in the rearview mirror, etc.), but the one above ("How to deal with a whiny kid") is the most widely circulated. The image at the right is more recent (captioned "Take Your Kid To Work Day"). Detail was lost, however, when the image of the boy was rotated 15° left (e.g., missing fingers on right hand).